Slashdot Mirror
97% of Climate Science Papers Agree Global Warming Is Man-made
An anonymous reader writes "A meta-study published yesterday looked at over 12,000 peer-reviewed papers on climate science that appeared in journals between 1991 and 2011. The papers were evaluated and categorized by how they implicitly or explicitly endorsed humans as a contributing cause of global warming. The meta-study found that an overwhelming 97.1% of the papers that took a stance endorsed human-cause global warming. They also asked the 1,200 of the scientists involved in the research to self-evaluate their own studies, with nearly identical results. In the interest of transparency, the meta-study results were published in an open access journal, and the researchers set up a website so that anybody can check their results. From the article: '... a memo from communications strategist Frank Luntz leaked in 2002 advised Republicans, "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate." This campaign has been successful. A 2012 poll from U.S. Pew Research Center found less than half of Americans thought scientists agreed humans were causing global warming. The media has assisted in this public misconception, with most climate stories "balanced" with a "skeptic" perspective. However, this results in making the 2–3% seem like 50%. In trying to achieve "balance," the media has actually created a very unbalanced perception of reality. As a result, people believe scientists are still split about what's causing global warming, and therefore there is not nearly enough public support or motivation to solve the problem.'"
Too bad the scientific method is no match for the stick-your-fingers-in-your-ears-and-yell-la-la-la-la-la method.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
But saying that 97% of climate science papers agree on it does not validate it.
Without regard to whether or not anthropogenic climate change is real: Which papers get published are largely a function of who's on the editorial board of each publication. If those boards are stacked with people holding a particular position, they tend to publish only papers which agree with that position.
I think they mean 97% of scientists agree that some amount of global warming is caused by mankind.The amount that is caused by humans may be some or even most, but I don't think anyone could argue that it is ALL caused by mankind.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The problem is that science . . . as a scholarly field as opposed to the practice of science . . . has no way to deal with the idea that a significant percentage of our leaders are in willful denial of the sound science. The reality of the research is defeated by their ideology.
This is not new (ask Gallileo) but it is new for the U.S.
I think we're just fucked.
> Most scientists believed the earth was flat. In the mid 1800's 99% of leading scientists did not
> believe in microbes. Louis Pasteur did. Consensus is meaningless.
Not true. By the 1490s, it had already been pretty well established that the earth was round. It was the uneducated masses and official church dogma that this was not true, and this created a climate where openly saying the earth was round was not exactly a safe position to take.
So while it may not have been en vogue to say the earth was round, privately, amongst those who did study the issue, it was allready known.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
...that reject AGW than there are that blame humans for most (>50%) of agw.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/on-the-consensus/
"The only time an abstract is rated as saying how much humans contribute to global warming is if it mentions:
that human activity is a dominant influence or has caused most of recent climate change (>50%).
If we use the system’s search feature for abstracts that meet this requirement, we get 65 results. That is 65, out of the 12,000+ examined abstracts. Not only is that value incredibly small, it is smaller than another value listed in the paper:
Reject AGW 0.7% (78)
Remembering AGW stands for anthropogenic global warming, or global warming caused by humans, take a minute to let that sink in. This study done by John Cook and others, praised by the President of the United States, found more scientific publications whose abstracts reject global warming than say humans are primarily to blame for it."
Boy, warmists are really bad at math!
Do those 97% of papers all predict the same effects of the man-made global warming?
And are those predicted effects of man-made global warming actually observed in real data that occurred *after* the predictions were made?
Once again, we go back to the standard process of: Weather event X occurs. (where, for example, X is a cool and wet spring that just happened in the midwest).
X is either:
1. PREDICTED BY GLOBAL WARMING MODELS!*
* Which model? There are so many to choose from and "global warming" can mean everything from "it will never snow in Europe again! We will have malaria and jungle diseases covering Norway!" to "Europe will be covered in glaciers because the Atlantic currents will fail!"
OR:
2. SO WHAT IF IT WASN'T PREDICTED! THAT'S JUST LOCAL WEATHER NOT THE CLIMATE!*
* But don't worry, if it gets hot this summer or if there's a mild winter somewhere, that will be proof of global warming and not "just the weather". You see, it's a one-way street where global warming is always right.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
What you say is definitively true. But that is not the point of the article, the point is to verify that the vast majority of experts believes (base don their study) that global warming is man made. Yet everybody you talk to tends to say to "experts are still debating". Well, with these numbers they are not still debating, they are pretty much convinced.
Yet, they might be wrong. But policies have to be made based on experts opinion. And that opinion is not properly represented in the media.
Strawman argument: no one is saying the studies are valid because there's a consensus about it. They're valid based on the science IN those studies. What the consensus means is that we are idiots to not invest in trying to avoid it. Perhaps it would have been foolish to start heavily taxing coal and oil back in the 70's or 80's, as climate change may have proven to be a false hypothesis, but now it's foolish not to. Or at least extraordinarily selfish and short-sighted.
Right, you can never validate a hypothesis in science. You can only fail to falsify it. In other words, no one can seem to come up with another good explanation for the warming we've observed, so we've failed to falsify the idea that it's due to carbon dioxide emissions, a hypothesis first proposed in 1896. That doesn't mean it's the truth, but I sure know which way I'd bet!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Publications that go against the accepted dogma of the day, are generally rejected and can cause death to the career of the author. Contrary opinions have to be snuck in and couched in vague wordings. I suspect this is also true with global warming research.
Proof is for mathematics and liquor. Science provides the best explanation based on current data, and there best explanation at the moment is that CO2 emissions from manmade sources are a major cause of observed climate change.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Nice strawman there. C02 warming that leads "to the destruction of life on earth' is not exactly the primary concern of most scientists.
There are a hell of a lot of really bad things that can result from C02 warming that don't involve the destruction of life on earth.
Life needs more saving throws.
the point is to verify that the vast majority of experts believes (base don their study) that global warming is man made.
Is entirely man-made or man contributed to it? Those are two very different statements. If we only contribute that suggests that it's going to happen no matter what we do, the best we could hope for is to delay the inevitable. Given the history of the planet, I think this is the more likely scenario and we would be better off spending our energy figuring out how, as a species, to survive it when it inevitably happens.
Secondly, they don't all believe in the same god.
Thirdly, they don't have any evidence of their god being real.
Indeed in all ways noted, the deniers (such as yourself) are more like the priests.
97% of deniers believe AGW is a fraud.
They don't believe in the same reason for that being true. And they have no evidence of their personal belief in their stated reason for it being a fraud.
Unfortunately, voting is not science. 99% of scientist used to say that "the Earth was flat", that "the Earth was the center of the Universe", that... All proved wrong.
I'm not arguing one way or the other on global warming but rather that having agreement is not a good metric.
By the way, I'm not a global warming skeptic. In fact, I'm pro-warming, it's better than the alternative of global cooling!
And why don't more people on this thread realize this? Everyone is saying "97% of scientists agree" when really, 2/3 of scientists didn't even take a position!
In other news, only a minority of physics papers agree that conservation of energy is real. The rest don't even mention it.
I find your lack of understanding of the philosophy and method of science disturbing.
In science, one can very rarely, if ever, "prove it irrefutably". One makes hypotheses to explain observations. The hypotheses must make testable predictions. The longer an hypothesis stands against scrutiny, and the more its predictions are verified, and the more new evidence is discovered which fits into the hypothesis, the more accepted it is considered.
Also, you say "else the first scientist to come along with better proof than yours will knock the whole house of cards down". My ignorant friend, this is exactly what science is. Exactly. If this were not the case it would not be science. At some point an accepted hypothesis becomes Theory, which is to say that if some contradictory observation were to be verified, it would necessitate a world-view-changing paradigm shift. Think, for example, of the revolution from Newtonian physics to General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics; an important thing to note is that the previous Theory was not even disproved - only its boundaries of accurate description of reality more rigorously defined.
That 97% of the body of published climate science finds in favour of the man-made global warming hypothesis, but none of the 3% against has yet managed to present verified disproof means it is only those ignorant of science that would disagree simply on the grounds of personal comfort.
On the other hand if 97% of climate science papers would agree on climate change NOT happening, this would be it. Case closed. Nobody would ever talk about it again.
Conversely, discounting the majority of scientific finding because it does not match what a particular group wants does not mean they are right. It does however mean that they have to provide better models then the majority.
Put another way, in science, the majority usually IS right, and there is a well established method for showing otherwise. Thus using majority opinion as an indicator of correctness, while not infallible, is generally pretty good. If nothing else the probability of 3% allowing political belief to influence their conclusions is greater then 97% doing so.
97.1% of the abstracts that take a stance on AGW endorse it. Abstracts that don't take a stance either way don't provide any relevant data here.
97% of scientists agree that global warming has the best and strongest proof. Now what?
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Yes, a lot of climatologists agree that there is a modest increase in global temperatures.
That in no way qualifies them to make statements or predictions about economics, agriculture, land use, or politics, and they certainly have no right to dictate to the rest of us how we make tradeoffs between current and future consumption.
Anecdotes that you read someplace on the interwebs do not qualify as evidence.
I think you might be on to something. For example, it's basically impossible for those studying the Stork Theory of Reproduction to gain any government funding. Same problem with those looking into the Green Cheese Theory of The Moon. Obviously this mere fact invalidates biology and cosmology.
If man had something to do with it, and our activity is essentially increasing exponentially with new humans being born all the time (and China kicking industrial action into high gear), then wouldn't the impact on climate also be exponential?
No, actually. CO2 concentrations increase temperature logarithmicly, so while population is increasing at a decreasing exponential rate (expected to hit 0% growth this century), the higher the concentration of CO2 goes, the less warming each addition ppm actualy contributes.
Human activity has been increasing, yet the whole warming thing STALLED 17 years ago.
You math is off, the warming trend is flat if (and only if) you take start from the fall of 1997, and that's 16 years currently. However, that's a cherry-picked start date and there are problems with choosing your data to make a particular point. more generally,you can always draw flat trend lines on noisy data regardless of whether the overall trend is up, down or constant.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Gravity is not the best example. The reason is that we really DON'T understand gravity very well. We know that there is a force that we call gravity that causes objects to attract. However we don't have a solid idea how it actually works. We can't get it to unify with the other forces, there are indications that our best theory on it (general relativity) is incomplete and so on.
The FACT of gravity, that objects attract or on a more human scale that shit falls down. We observe this all the time, there's not really a question that there is this force. However the THEORY of gravity, meaning the explanation for what it is and how it works, is something that is not solid.
Now one can of course argue this to global warming as well. There is the fact that average global temperature has been rising, outside of known cycles. There is then the theory as to why, in particular that the primary or exclusive cause is increased atmospheric CO2 levels due to human emissions. One can accept the fact but argue the theory.
Just saying, maybe pick a better example.
It seems to me that you have labeled this as a fallacy known as "appeal to belief" incorrectly. The 97% are not just anybody, but are papers from peer reviewed journals. These are authorities. The argument in this case is an appeal to authority, but it is not a fallacious appeal because in this case, the ones claiming to be authorities in fact are so qualified.
The study is just another case in point demonstrating the strong consensus among climate scientists that AGW is real.
What you say is true however this study covers papers from the past 22 years since 1991. Given the controversy around the subject the fact that no one has been able to come up with a serious challenge to the dominant paradigm in climate science in all that time is telling. Any scientist who was able to come up with something that overturned current climate science would certainly cement their reputation in the annals of history.
"Vote for us, or coastal cities will get flooded, there will be mass starvation and wars, bankers will rob you blind, and gunmen will kill your children in mass shootings!"
Yup, the politics of fear is our problem.